Our frequent commenter KrazyTA was not pleased when Arne Duncan told California it could not stop state testing while introducing Common Core testing.
This was his observation:
This latest statement by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan needs to be viewed in context.
If you read his speech to the April 2013 American Education Research Association he is: for standardized testing and against it; it is useful and not useful and somewhat useful; education is all about testing and not all about testing and somewhat about testing; tests measure and mismeasure and somewhat measure learning and teaching; and to get to the point before his distinguished audience, schools and test experts need to get their testing act together. The clincher: “Some schools have an almost obsessive culture around testing, and that hurts their most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum. It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as “below basic” or “I’m a one out of four.””
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
What is one to make of all this ‘word salad’ that wanders all over the place and seeks to placate and deflect? Teresa Watanabe let the cat out of the bag in the LATIMES of 8-29-13, “State academic performance slips, but L.A. Unified improves.” Her first paragraph: “California public schools lost ground this year in overall academic performance for the first time in a decade, but more than half met state goals for achievement on reading and math standardized tests.”
So just how important are standardized tests in the overall scheme of things?
“The achievement ratings, called the Academic Performance Index, are based on a 1,000-point scale compiled from standardized test scores. They are widely viewed as a comprehensive marker of school quality, affecting property values and triggering penalties, among other effects.”
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-api-scores-20130829,0,447246.story
In other words, the quality of schools and student achievement and teacher effectiveness = scores on high-stakes standardized tests.
Am I exaggerating? Taking him out of context? Obviously not, for even when for good reasons—within the very strictures imposed by high-stakes standardized testing!—state officials take obvious action to forego for a short time one round of the Holy Edumetrics of $tudent $ucce$$ in order to prepare for another, the Secretary of Education suddenly grows a backbone and speaks his mind plain and simple:
“If California moves forward with a plan that fails to assess all its students, as required by federal law,” Duncan said in a statement released Monday night, “the Department will be forced to take action, which could include withholding funds from the state.”
Link: [the second above in Diane’s posting]
One of the great functions of this blog: to make it possible to put such folks on the spot with their own public words and actions!
Duane Swacker: I think this is a rare instance of you and I parting company on measuring qualities by quantities. I think that blind acceptance of the all-importance of the scores of high-stakes standardized testing can give us an excellent measure of the LACK of: creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, civic-mindedness, compassion, empathy, courage, imagination, and humility [not to mention others]. [taken from Gerald Bracey, EDUCATION HELL, 2009, p. 4].
Just look at the current Secretary of Education. He passed the high-stakes standardized test of “LACK of” with flying colors! He scored a perfect 100 out of 100!
🙂
Lastly, on the misuse and overuse of standardized testing in general, from THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013) by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, p. 147:
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things. —John Tukey mathematician Bell Labs and Princeton University”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have good news!
Arne Duncan has decided to listen to someone other than the handful of billionaires he usually consults:
#EdTour13 takeaway: Stop talking, Washington. Listen to America’s educators, students and families.
I speak enough “politician” to know that this stern lecture is not actually a vow by Mr. Duncan to stop talking and listen, but is instead the boilerplate and standard politician’s attack on “Washington”, but maybe he’ll read his own Tweet, right? 🙂
“If California moves forward with a plan that fails to assess all its students, as required by federal law,” Duncan said in a statement released Monday night, “the Department will be forced to take action, which could include withholding funds from the state.”
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Why is he citing “federal law” with respect to education? Is or is not education meant, Constitutionally, to be the domain of individual states?
It will be interesting to see where this goes next….
I wonder if Arne Duncan reads this blog.
Arne can read? Love KTA!
Not critically….doublespeak reigns and he doesn’t know it.
Duncan has a staff person who monitors Diane for him. Remember? It used to be communications director Peter Cunningham, but now it has been moved to one of these other job descriptions:
SENIOR STAFF
Political Appointees at the U.S. Department of Education
U.S. Department of Education Appointments Since January 2009
http://www2.ed.gov/news/staff/update.html
He should be required to do an opinion piece on one of the blog’s posts, using text based evidence within the post to support his writing!
To paraphrase Einstein:
Not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that can be measured matters.
Here in Florida, the amount of testing is now out of control. Here’s my take on testing as brought before the School Board of Palm Beach County:
Well said.
Wow. Clear, courageous, and eloquent. How fortunate it was captured on video.
Thank you for speaking for all of us, as a teacher and parent, Andy.
Thank you. Children are not data points, and I applaud your courage for speaking out for your child and every child in America.
President Obama, Arne Duncan, and every other political assistant following this blog: Watch, listen and reconsider your present policies. This father speaks of the same hope and dreams all of you have for your children. Make these dreams possible for every child in America.
Thank you Mr. Goldstein. I sent this video link to many.
Well said Andy!
And they gave you more than two minutes to say it. You put a lot into the three, count em, three minutes you were allotted.
Wonderful, Andy. Beautifully said.
Let me amend my piece in one respect.
Terminology is important, for the use of certain words can mislead and misinform as well as educate and get across one’s intended meaning.
For example, the well-known psychometrician Daniel Koretz provides the following key definition for an ubiquitous term used when describing high-stakes standardized tests: “Reliability is often incorrectly used to mean ‘accurate’ or ‘valid,’ but it properly refers only to the consistency of measurement” (MEASURING UP: WHAT EDUCATIONAL TESTING REALLY TELLS US, paperback edition 2008, p. 30). He then immediately adds: “A measure can be reliable but inaccurate—such as a scale that consistently reads too high. We are accustomed to highly reliable measurements in many aspects of our lives: for example, when we measure body temperature or the length of a table we are considering buying. Unfortunately, scores on educational tests tend to be much less reliable than these measurements” (pp. 30-31).
I apologize to anyone who feels that Koretz is splitting hairs. I would be remiss, however, if I did not immediately add that after further reading of his and other works I found his definition extremely helpful in understanding the mindset of standardized test designers, producers, administrators and scorers. Regardless of whether or not this bit of “in-house jargon” rubs one the wrong way, it is (IMHO) one of the keys to understanding the built-in strengths and weaknesses of standardized tests as well as the misunderstandings of the same by the general public and misuses of the term as used by politicians, edufrauds, and all those in pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$.
The key bits of terminology I would like to amend are referenced in this passage from THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013, pp. 184-185) by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, appearing in chapter three under the subtitle “Learning”:
“One of the most unfortunate and miseducative consequences of the early twenty-first century’s ‘orgy of tabulation’ in schools continues to be the constriction of what is taught and how it is taught so that both match more closely the way that learning is assessed by thoroughly inadequate models. A scan of the educational literature relevant to assessment, in fact, finds the word ‘learning’ often replaced by the psychometrically correct ‘achievement,’ or the more theatrical ‘student performance,’ as is evident in all the critiques above. Sadly, the value of of every sort of educational experience, concept, technique, or intervention gets regularly weighed against its capacity for increasing achievement or raising student performance, rather than the more expansive and pragmatic goal of improving student learning.”
Please excuse this long comment.
Hence the concept of validity. We need to make sure we know what we are measuring and what it tells us.
Like you said.
“Hence the concept of validity.”
If I may interject my tres centavos (have to one up KTA on the centavo thing) worth at this point. And since we’re talking about centavos here, which are the coin of the realm, one ought to realize that reliability and validity are two sides of the same centavo with with validity claiming the cabeza and the side and reliability relegated to the cola or back side. Reliability invariably and inextricably is tied to, reliant on validity.
“A measure can be reliable but inaccurate—such as a scale that consistently reads too high. . . . Unfortunately, scores on educational tests tend to be much less reliable than these measurements”.
Again, reliability invariably and inextricably is tied to, reliant on validity as Wilson has shown. Now those of you long standing/sitting readers of this blog know I’m on a Quixotic Quest to rid the world of those nefarious, wicked, evil, sinful, iniquitous, egregious, heinous, atrocious, vile, foul, abominable, odious, depraved, monstrous, fiendish, diabolical, unspeakable, despicable and any other synonym for nefarious educational malpractices that comprise the sorting and separating out of students through educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students.
At this point I would usually recommend reading and understanding Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 but this time I am recommending a shorter read of his in which he takes on the reliability issue using the testing bible itself, the American Educational Research Association; American Psychological Association; National Council on Measurement in Education. (2002). “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing”, to explode the reliability of standardized tests. This 15 page read should open your mind to the unreliability of tests and any results/conclusions drawn from them. See: “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at: http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5index.html
As the old Spanish aphorism goes: Mejor ser la cabeza de la rata que la cola del león.
You ask people, Duane, to go deeper. You raise significant philosophical issues. Philosophy as Socrates so it was not any sort of abstract pontification. It was always a stepping back from the practical to ask, “Well, what, exactly, do you mean here?” So, philosophy was never divorced from praxis but, rather, was a reaction to the fact that we can be victims of our unexamined ideas or we can stop and think those through AND THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. To be a practical person who shuns philosophy is to be a victim of an unexamined default philosophy. Thank you for continuing to bring that to people’s attention. The designers of the deform juggernaut created an engine of “standards” to run it but didn’t think for two seconds about what a standard would be. Neither did they give any thought to or make any real critical examination of the varieties, possibilities, and purposes of measurement. I wish you luck in this crusade, Duane. I have been musing about the self-defeating contradictions of summative assessment and grading systems since I started as a teacher many, many years ago. The deformers are heedless. To them, philosophy is like what the coach does before the game: “Let me tell you guys what my philosophy is. You get out there and win because you have heart.” That sort of crap. It’s not essential, foundational thinking so that one might avoid terrible error in one’s practical undertakings.
Always this wisdom from you, KrazyTA!
the constriction of what is taught and how it is taught so that both match more closely the way that learning is assessed by thoroughly inadequate models
That is PRECISELY what’s happening. Thank you for articulating this so clearly. How very much I wish that every school board in the country understood what you are saying here.
I am Krazy about this post!
Way to go, Krazy TA!
The main issue is his comment that if Ca does not do as the Arne says they will be punished. That is it! Education is a state issue! The Constitution makes it so. I wonder how Arne reconciles that?
In the end, it is all about the money (see Diane’s post on Joyce Foundation links), Arne’s ties with Pear$on (which is, of course, buying up every textbook/test publishing company on Earth–latest acquisition–Scott Foresman), the ALEC agenda &–last but not least–his allegiance to Broad. So what if he speaks out of both sides of his mouth? He can do that, for he knows that all is gibberish, and that the tests are
neither valid nor reliable; we educators are not allowed to see the tests or interpretations of results–only meaningless numbers, which tell us nothing at all.
Three cheers to California, and may their logic spread to other states–and quickly!
“I think this is a rare instance of you and I parting company on measuring qualities by quantities. I think that blind acceptance of the all-importance of the scores of high-stakes standardized testing can give us an excellent measure of the LACK of: creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, civic-mindedness, compassion, empathy, courage, imagination, and humility [not to mention others].”
KTA, you have a variety of incomparable ways of getting your points across. I applaud you and am quite jealous of your writing abilities. I always look forward to your posts!! Keep em coming!!
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things.”
That echoes what I have posted before: “Doing the Wrong Thing Right”
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan (Viet Nam) acknowledged doing the wrong thing righter when he noted in “Sir! No Sir!” that:
“I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
Who knew that Thoreau would be so prescient in describing the current state of affairs in the USA.
Although my IQ score came out identically on two tests, one an individually administered test just before I entered 9th grade and the other, a one sheet paper and pencil IQ test for adults I took in an EdPsych course 30 years later, suggesting reliability based on validity to an underlying reality, in general, I very much agree with your view that “Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more” and with Thoreau that most people tend to submit to the state in general, and, as represented by education, with “no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; . . . Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.” Yet such people vote, and here we are with Obama as President, twice, and Duncan as Secretary of Education, with corruption in many of the alternatives to the public school systems and folly in the public school systems themselves and in many of their denizens, in both perhaps fed by greed and careerism. Meanwhile, students go begging for real education.
“Meanwhile, students go begging for real education.”
Would you elaborate on what a “real education” means for you. Thanks!